Gold Trading – Forex Academy

Investors will always try to diversify their investments in order to reduce their risk. Specifically seek the investments of safe haven that have a better when the rest of the market drops. Of these safe investments – treasury bills, Swiss francs, and others, investors think gold is the best. For this reason, you will see that investors often include gold in their portfolios. Now with COVID19, gold is the order of the day and has a lot of attention from investors

Gold as Merchandise

Like any other asset, the price of gold is determined by demand and supply. Most of the world’s gold comes from hard rock mining, but it can also be produced by alluvial mining methods or as a by-product of copper mining. China, Australia, and Russia are the largest gold producers in the world. Regarding demand, the main use of gold is jewelry production. It is also used in aerospace, medicine, dentistry, and electronics. Governments and central banks are gold buyers.

At present, the United States is the largest holder of gold, while Germany is second and the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) third. Private investors like you are also interested in buying gold and treat the purchase of gold as an investment. For this reason we have thought to make this guide.

Why are private investors investing in gold? Instead of keeping money in cash, investors can buy gold when they expect a recession, geopolitical uncertainty, inflation, or currency depreciation. Sometimes they keep it as insurance against the market crash. You can’t always predict unwanted events, so it makes sense to keep assets that do well as protection against a market crash.

Over the past 40 years, gold has recorded significant gains from 1979 to 1980 and from 2000 to 2011. It fought during the 1990s and after 2011. Fears of inflation and recession led to gold peaking in 1980, while several events caused gold to be traded higher after 1999. The 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq kept the price high until 2003. The insurance purchase was behind the gold surge in the 2007 recession. It continued its upward trend as the market traded downwards, with economic uncertainty as to the main issue.

Problems in Europe, the weakening of the US dollar, and concerns about economic recovery kept the price of gold high until 2011. Do not think that gold behaves itself or always well. It has had difficulties during the 1990s due to GDP growth in the US, interest rate increases in 1995, and a strict fiscal policy. After 2011, the strength of the U.S. dollar and the U.S. economy damaged gold. The stock market broke a downward trend and became an upward trend and investors were not as interested in owning gold as insurance. So, now you know a little more about gold and why people can invest in it, let’s see how you can invest in gold

Investing in Physical Gold

If you want to expose yourself to gold, one way is to buy gold jewelry, gold coins, or gold bullion. Gold bullion is traded very close to the price of gold and may refer to gold bars or gold bullion coins.

Gold bars have no artistic value, which differentiates them from jewellery or coin. To buy gold bullion you must pay a premium on the price of gold that can be in a range of 3 to 10 percent. You will also need to use a vault or bank deposit box to store it. You can buy physical gold online, at a jewelry store, or at another gold store.

Before buying, make sure that the price is right, the gold is real and proven, and that you’re not paying a higher premium for collector coins if you’re just looking for pure gold. Be willing to move away if these rules are not possible to comply with, in particular, if it is an online store or a shop window of dubious repute.

A trusted online store with a 4.9 rating in the google store is Silver Gold Bull, which not only allows you to buy gold, but will also store it, and buy it back if you decide to sell it for a profit. When you buy gold, you need to store it properly. It is possible to store it at home, but security problems could arise in this case. If you prefer to do so buy and keep it at home, make sure you have a proper safe, and take steps to protect your property.

Buying Gold Futures

Futures contracts are standard contracts traded on organised exchanges. Allow an investor to sell or buy an underlying in a given time in the future and at the price of the futures contract. First, you need to open an account with a broker. My recommendation is to use Interactive brokers as it is the broker I use 20 years ago and has never been a problem.

The gold futures contract at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange covers 100 troy ounces (ZG), although there is also a future smaller Mini that has no physical delivery (QG). To operate it, it is necessary to deposit an initial margin, which is a minimum amount necessary to open a position. Every day your position will be marked to the market. This means that if the value goes in your direction, you will get a profit, but if it goes against you, you will lose money.

If your account falls below the maintenance margin, you will need to transfer money to your account to meet the securities required by the broker. Futures contracts are leveraged instruments. You only need the balance of your account to be equal to the initial margin, which is less than the value of the entire contract. A 100-ounce contract is currently worth about $170,000, and you only need an amount less than $10,000 to open a position.

Some brokers do not have the delivery option, so the contract is settled in cash when it expires. Maturity is also a standardized feature of the gold futures contract and investors can choose their time horizon based on standard maturity. The prices of subsequent maturity contracts may be higher than the spot price and early maturity futures. When this is the situation, we usually say that the financial market is in a quagmire.

In another situation, when the spot price or the price of early-maturity contracts is higher than the price of late-maturity futures contracts, we are behind schedule. If you find yourself buying gold at the time the market is in contango, you additionally will have to pay a premium for contracts later due.

Invest in Gold ETFs

If you’re not a fan of investing in gold futures, you can try gold ETFs. Instead of having a futures contract and paying attention to the maintenance margin, you can buy shares in ETFs and get gold exposure.

If this is the first time you’ve been able to invest in ETF before and want to start, you must understand its operation well. Once you choose a broker, just open an account and choose your preferred gold ETF. The most popular gold ETF is SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE: GLD) and costs 0.40 percent per year to own it. ETF follows the price of gold bullion.

Investing in Gold Mining Companies

An investment in gold mining companies offers gold exposure, but exposure is sometimes limited. These companies carry operational risks, which can break the correlation with the price of gold. Gold miners are at risk of default and their shares may be quoted lower in case of an operational problem with the company, regardless of the price of gold.

ETFs seem to be the best way to invest in gold. If you don’t like to own futures and control initial and maintenance margins, you can buy shares in an ETF and follow the price of gold bullion. GLD is a liquid instrument and does not have high transaction costs. Futures are sometimes difficult to handle, so ETFs can be the right move.

Invest in Gold CFDs

If you don’t want to open a futures account or don’t have that much capital, you can buy gold CFDs at a regulated broker. In these cases, the investment can be from about 1000 euros in a regulated broker. The fundamental aspect that you have to pay attention to is in the Swap, which is the daily cost that the broker will charge you for keeping a CFD from one day to the next.

Today we’re gonna talk about what diversification means and gold as part of a diversified portfolio. Finally, we will analyze the gold, what has happened in recent months, and what we expect from it in the coming months.

If we want to define diversification we could do it as a way to invest in different assets with the aim of reducing portfolio risk. There are different theories and formulas, but the important thing is to understand that the assets in which you invest have to be totally or partially uncorrelated. Investing in BBVA and Telefónica at the level of decoupling is of little use. It obviously implies a small diversification (although only sectoral), but they are quite correlated assets. If the bag goes down or up, as the beta of the two is very similar, the two will go up and down. As we can assume, this is not the best way to reduce risk or volatility. The same would be extendable, for example, to the case of buying the American stock exchange: within being diversifying (geographically), we would be doing it with a highly correlated product.

If we want to define diversification we could do it as a way to invest in different assets with the aim of reducing portfolio risk. To make effective and real diversification we have to do it by investing in assets that have a correlation close to 0, both positive and negative. To diversify you can combine many assets, but there is a limit after which, even by increasing the number of assets in a portfolio, you do not reduce risk (It is called systemic risk).

Some theories say that this number varies between 8 and 12 assets, but depends a lot on whether they are separate assets, funds, or sectoral indices. To make effective and real diversification we have to do it by investing in assets that have a correlation close to 0. To build an efficient portfolio, we need to know the volatility (variance of the assets that make it up), and its correlations. Thus we can estimate the optimal diversification of a portfolio (also called an efficient border).

It is important to note that the correlations of these assets, which make up a portfolio, vary over time. For this reason, the composition of the portfolio has to be adjusted if we want to have optimal and efficient diversification.

One of the great virtues of the Seasonal Quant Multistrategy Sphere, FI is precisely that it is not correlated with any other asset as it develops a unique strategy based on the seasonalities of raw materials. For this reason, it can perfectly be part of the diversification of an efficient portfolio, more when it has really low volatility and therefore is suitable for the vast majority of investors.

Lately, there have been many comments from permanent portfolios, which are always on the market, but we think that in the case of gold this is not entirely true. You have to know how to choose the moment, as in many other investments, since gold can bring negative returns to the portfolio at certain times and even increase volatility. Let’s see it.

For starters, let’s compare the long-term behavior of gold with the SP500 index and 10-year American bonds (treasuries). We take the VOO (ETF of the SP500), the GLD (ETF of gold), and the TLT (ETF of long-term bonds). The comparison began in 1974 after the gold standard with Nixon ended in 1971. It coincides that it is the first year that has long-term bond data. “Heavy spending for the Vietnam War”

Gold has its moments, in 1974 it goes up 72%, while the SP500 goes down 26%. During the dot.com bubble gold rose by 21% (2000-2002) while the SP500 fell by 38% and in the last crisis 2008, the SP500 fell by 38% while gold only rose by 8%. In 1980 gold was quoted at 590/oz and in 2005 it was worth the same.

Combining an asset always with another asset with which it has a near zero or negative correlation does not help much if the asset in question is not of absolute return. And it has its times as bad as gold. I mean, you have to know the time to have it in your wallet.

Gold may be a safe haven currency, it even seems to beat inflation during the comparison period, but not having much more utility should not be added to a permanent portfolio as a long-term investment, because in many cases it has very negative returns and adds volatility to the portfolio. In addition, it often does not serve as coverage in bad times, as has been shown.

“If you look at the March data, we see that they have all dropped, gold, equity, and bonds. Something incredible. We call this total correlation.”

Let’s give an example, if we stop to observe in the March data, you see that they’ve all gone down, gold, equity, and bonds. That’s amazing. We call this total correlation. Assets that a priori should not move in tandem, do so and this destroys any portfolio. This is the reason why the management team of the Seasonal Sphere Quant Multistrategy, FI thinks that you have to have gold in your portfolio, but selectively and punctually. We have already taken a position and will continue to ponder it as long as external factors indicate that it is reasonable to have it because it can provide profitability and control of volatility.

What happened in the past months and what we expect from GOLD in the coming months? What happened in March to make everything correlate? To find out the best time to have gold in the portfolio we believe it is important to know what happened in March and the previous months with gold.

There are two main reasons for this March downturn. The first is in the futures market. The fact that speculators are strongly positioned long hands does not like it. The good thing about being all leveraged is that with a small move you clean up the market and this is precisely what happened. Strong hands shake the tree a little so that those who can’t keep warranties close (they’ll buy back in highs and help raise the price further when strong hands come off.).

And the cleaning of the market came:

We have seen the fastest decline in the equity market in years, even I think we can say the fastest in history (in days). Liquidity has been reduced even in the high-quality bond market and all accompanied by a rise in bestial volatility.

A rise in volatility leads to higher collateral margins for participants, that is, the money they need to take into account every day in order to keep their leveraged positions open. And as many operators lost in equities and fixed income the shortage of volume made them sell at worse prices, because many chose to sell what was still in profits and had liquidity. This dragged to the market at the time when everything went wrong. It rarely happens, but it does happen, so it’s important to diversify a portfolio with the right assets.

In addition, the market needed to be cleaned up so that something out of the ordinary could happen and the market could return to highs. We can observe that during the mass liquidations of March, more or less 100,000 contracts (100000x100x1720= about 17.2MM (nominal billion) have left the market, giving the green light to see new highs. In addition, there have been two more events, the Coronavirus (Covid-19) which is an event not expected by anyone (we have also seen how it has put the world economies against the wall) and of course, as expected, central banks all agree to mass-print money (more than ever) as a theoretically infallible remedy to exit the crisis. We will see in the future how the experiment ends.

With the current price of the future of gold over $1,720, a significant volume of open positions on call 2,500 this December, but also on call 3,000, and even on call 4,000. In addition, there is still a very strong interest for the call 3.500 and call 4.000 of June 2021. Therefore, and although we know that options positions are often part of a more complete portfolio, combined with futures or with options spreads, we conclude that there is a very strong bullish bet on gold by the market.